Stressors make everything difficult, of which poverty is a massive one.
Only partially - only ~40-50% of a person's IQ are a result of parental genetics [3]. The rest is a result of the environment in which the child is raised - and there are very important factors at play that directly correlate with income of the parents:
- Does each child have their own, adequately sized, room with a study desk to work in and concentrate? During the pandemic it turned out to be a real problem that children who had to share rooms had issues following streamed lectures.
- Are the living conditions actually healthy? Poor people are often forced by their poverty to live in decrepit conditions: noise from highways or rails, toxic emissions from nearby factories, general issues with toxicity (paint, lead water pipes, mould). All of this has direct outcome on performance of students.
- Do the children, particularly those of working age (14 and above, but especially 16 and above) have to work actual jobs to make pocket money or contribute to household income?
- Are the parents largely absent from their children's lives because both parents have to work full-time or worse jobs just to make ends meet?
- Can the parents invest time and money into furthering their children's education? Can they sit together with them in the afternoon/evening and work through homework problems? Can they afford side education, playing instruments or similar activities that have been shown to have a positive effect on education?
- Do the parents have enough money to feed the children? Hundreds of thousands of students alone in New York depend on schools handing out free lunches, which turned out to be a massive problem during the pandemic [1].
- Poverty causes stress - not just from being cooped together in too small living spaces, but also in food insecurity, increased fights between parents over the stress, or in the worst cases from literally being homeless [2].
[1] https://www.foodandwine.com/news/new-york-city-school-childr...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/nyregion/nyc-homeless-chi...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Molecular_g...
I had a small that I shared with two brothers. My desk was minuscule. I had top grades.
>Do the children, particularly those of working age (14 and above, but especially 16 and above) have to work actual jobs to make pocket money or contribute to household income?
My family was so poor at a time we didn't have the money to pay the mortgage and the bank wanted to take our house. I had top grades.
>Are the parents largely absent from their children's lives because both parents have to work full-time or worse jobs just to make ends meet?
My parents were and are apathetic to my existence. I had top grades.
>Can the parents invest time and money into furthering their children's education? Can they sit together with them in the afternoon/evening and work through homework problems? Can they afford side education, playing instruments or similar activities that have been shown to have a positive effect on education?
None of that existed in my house. Nobody helped me doing homework and nobody sit with me exploring my life path. I rented instruments and asked as few money as possible. I had top grades.
>Do the parents have enough money to feed the children? Hundreds of thousands of students alone in New York depend on schools handing out free lunches, which turned out to be a massive problem during the pandemic.
Admittedly, even in poverty we never were hungry.
>Poverty causes stress - not just from being cooped together in too small living spaces, but also in food insecurity, increased fights between parents over the stress, or in the worst cases from literally being homeless.
This I wholeheartedly agree, that's why the "money doesn't make you happy" is such a lie.
I know my tone was rather flippant but the relationship between money, stress and academics is so important to me. And by the way, even after all these top grades, and a Physics degree and speaking English, French, Italian and German and whatever I haven't escaped poverty. I'm back living to my parents at 27. It seems like the best way to make money in Italy is to inherit it.
Your response appears utterly useless in this discussion except to highlight that even those who grew up in poverty cannot be expected to have any empathy for those who share a similar background.
We should help all kids from poverty, but we shouldn't ignore the huge factor talents plays in how well they will perform in school. Saying things like "rich kids only do well because they get good support" is ignorant. That support helps, but parts of it is genes as well, both are important factors, and understanding how those factors interacts is important to give each kid the best help they can get.
I was living in a four man tent during my exams, fortunately I had it to myself.
Not the best situation to be in but its made me hyper aware of how corrupt the criminals running the world are.
Actually there is a direct correlation between adult IQ and stress [1], it isn't genetic though.
> The adult IQs of adopted children have very little correlation with those of the adoptive parents who raised them or those of their adopted, non-biological siblings.
To quote [2]: "Studies of mixed-race children and black children adopted by white parents suggest, however, that racial differences in test performance are largely if not entirely environmental in origin."
In any case the question is open if "IQ testing" is actually a decent measure of intelligence, especially with children that suffer from a variety of stuff somewhere on the ADHD/autism spectrum (e.g. selective mutism, anxiety issues), or if it can be used as a metric at all due to disparities in testing incidence between population segments - often enough, it's teachers who recommend IQ and ADHD tests, and there have been a number of suggestions that racial and other discrimination can negatively affect children there.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/analysis-h...
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-white-test-scor...